The percentage of Bitcoin's network hashrate signaling support for Bitcoin Unlimited has more than doubled from 16 percent to 35 percent over the past month. During this period, various Bitcoin businesses and organizations have become increasingly critical of Bitcoin Unlimited's concept of Emergent Consensus .
Emergent Consensus is the idea that the hard-coded limit on the size of blocks on the Bitcoin network should be replaced with a configurable variable for miners and full nodes. Users and miners would need to coordinate with each other before changing their block size preferences if the goal is for everyone to remain on the same chain.
The general lack of support for Emergent Consensus among Bitcoin companies and organizations has led some to question why some mining pools, such as Bitcoin.com and ViaBTC, are running the Bitcoin Unlimited software client (or at least signaling support for it).
To gain a better understanding of various mining pools' reasons for signaling support for Emergent Consensus, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Bitcoin.com and ViaBTC, the latter of which recently raised 20 million CNY ($2.91 million) to launch a new, global bitcoin exchange.
Representatives from both pools claimed that support for Segregated Witness (SegWit), which is implemented in Bitcoin Core and not Bitcoin Unlimited , is overstated and that Bitcoin Unlimited is the best option for solving issues related to transaction backlogs and historically high U.S. dollar-denominated transaction fees.
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